TERRAFORMING TERRA
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Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Squatters Reveal the True State of the Housing Market

This item tells u a lot about the development of squatting and also informs on the real state of housing today. It appears most of the abandonment that took place in 2008 is now largely reabsorbed. Messy but done.

At the same time it appears that teams of light traveling squatters are using any such abandoned space that they can. Not so bad a plan actually. A storage locker can hold your real possession handily. Then you simply move in with friends to an abandoned house. With fake documents you can even order power and the like.

Inevitably ownership is vested with a mortgage holder who actually may approve provided the squatters do not strip the wiring and even that may be no issue if the place is slated for demolition. After all this helps control mold and worse.

According to CNBC
one way to slow down the Fed and its impending interest rate hikes is
for builders to construct more homes. You see, according to Lawrence
Yun, the chief economist and senior vice president of research at the
National Association of Realtors,

Over the past 10 years from 2007 to 2016, average housing
starts were 900,000 per year. That is grossly inadequate. That is why
there is a housing shortage across the country. Inventory supply of
homes available for sale remains at historic lows, and rental vacancy
rates have fallen to under 7 percent, the lowest since the mid-1980s.

Yes, you heard that right, there are not enough houses, which is
driving up a CPI component that makes up 24.5% of the index.
“Specifically, rent rose 3.9 percent, while the homeowners' equivalent
of rent increased by 3.5 percent. The latter requires assumptions and is
a bit fuzzy, but essentially, it tries to measure what homeowners would
pay in rent to live in the home they own,” explains Mr. Yun.

Fuzzy is right. Investopedia
says “owners' equivalent rent is obtained by directly asking sampled
homeowners the following question: ‘If someone were to rent your home
today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and
without utilities?’”

While economists are worried about too few houses being built, squatting in vacant homes has become an epidemic in Las Vegas.

No doubt, more than a small bit of what behavioral economists call
the “endowment effect” is at work here, which “is the hypothesis that
people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them.” But
the compilers of CPI wouldn’t want the facts to get in the way of their
figures. So they believe whatever guess a homeowner might make as to how
much their home sweet home would rent for.

While economists are worried about too few houses being built,
squatting in vacant homes has become an epidemic in Las Vegas, where 2%
of all homes sit vacant, remnants of the housing crash that left 80% of
mortgagees underwater. John Glionna, writing for The Guardian,
explains “Las Vegas metropolitan police, which patrol an area of nearly
two million residents, have seen a 25% leap in the last three years in
calls for service regarding suspected squatters, up to nearly 5,000
annually.”

In North Las Vegas, which was hit very hard by the crash, “officers
have worked to remove trespassers from 180 homes in the last year
alone.”

In a recent presentation Metro police Lieutenant Nick Farese
presented a map showing squatter reports from across the Las Vegas
Valley. Last year law enforcement received 5,394 complaints about
squatters — an average of 16 a day. In 2014, Metro received
approximately 3,000 calls.

“This is affecting the entire valley,” Farese told The Sun. “There’s $600 million in property that is essentially being held hostage.”

Opportunities for Scammers

Squatter scams are nothing if not clever. North Las Vegas police
officer Scott Vaughn told The Guardian about investigating a scammer who
scoped out long term occupant motels in town looking for pawns to take
up residence in abandoned houses. “For $700, he can get them into a
vacant house, where they can stay rent free until a bank pays them
$3,500 to vacate the premises.” Brilliant.

Calling the cops and having them remove squatters isn’t easy. In many
cases, Lt. Farese told the Las Vegas Sun, “people living in homes
without authorization had presented officers with fake leases that they
either drafted or received from scammers claiming to be representatives
of the property owners.”

Home ownership was sold to Americans with carefully calculated governmental policies.

Nevada lawmakers made squatting a specific crime in 2015 to little
effect. This session Assemblyman Edgar Flores has proposed a bill that
would require leases on single-family homes to be notarized and contain
contact information for the landlord or property agent. Leases without
that information would be presumed phony. However, finding a compliant
notary and having fake landlords on call wouldn’t seem to be difficult.

In his book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, Robert Neuwirth
suggested in 2004 that there were one billion squatters globally. He
forecasts there will be two billion by 2030 and three billion by 2050.

A quick peek online
gives you tips on how to squat, claiming it “is a great way to avoid
paying rent, annex parts of your neighbors' yards, or even take a whole
house from someone if you’re willing to take the risk.” Tips include:
“Squatting by yourself is not likely to work out well.” “You want to
choose fellow squatters who have the same goals as you and who have
compatible personalities.” “Set ground rules together.”

And according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the country
abounds with vacant housing units. Over 17 million by their count. But
despite millions of vacant units, “The National Association of Realtors estimates that the country’s supply of for-sale and rental units combined is 3 million units short of current demand.”

Government belief in homeownership began with Herbert Hoover.
Disturbed that the 1920 census reflected a decline in homeownership,
“Hoover offered a vigorous, new approach to the housing problem through
the application of federal, voluntary, and business cooperative
activity,” Janet Hutchinson writes in “Building for Babbitt: The State
and the Suburban Home Ideal.”

Home ownership was sold to Americans with “carefully calculated
governmental policies that proselytized Americans about the virtues of
suburban home ownership while opposing outright market intervention,”
explains Hutchison.

Government’s belief that more housing means more prosperity, has
created millions of empty houses and billions of dollars of wasted
capital. At the same time, human ingenuity stands ready to take
advantage of these malinvestments.

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Gadget

About Me

Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.